The importance of parents and teachers as stakeholders in school-based healthy eating programs

Schools have a crucial role for promoting and establishing healthy behaviors early in the life-course. In recent years, a substantial effort and resources have been invested in attempts to change the 'food culture' in schools in westernized societies. Large school-based programs which promote healthy eating often utilize an ecological model for instigating behavior change amongst school children. An ecological model is a set of comprehensive intervention strategies that target a multitude of factors which influence the eating practices of children in the school setting. The cultural issues that necessitate these healthy eating programs mean that interventions are not without challenges to their application and effectiveness particularly as they rely on collaboration between stakeholders: teachers, parents, public health practitioners, policy makers and more. The stakeholder input and relations are key parts of planning, implementing and evaluating complex health promotion and education programs in schools. This commentary will outline the importance of considering both teachers and parents as influencing agents or 'enablers' in the process of creating change in this context. Parental perceptions and teachers’ insights are critical for underpinning intervention feasibility, acceptability and performance. Their perceptions and understandings can provide ground-level and highly applicable expertise and importantly motivate children in the school environment. The philosophical principles behind parent and teacher integration into formal program evaluation are discussed, providing a theoretical basis for program evaluation. Recommendations are made for policy makers, researchers and professional evaluation experts’ to consider and integrate these stakeholders in future programs

Contesting far flung fields: sociological studies of migration and acculturation through sport

Sport remains one field in which the migration of people around the globe remains a significant phenomenon, both in terms of the movement of elite athletes, and the impact that sports participation can have on more general migrant and host communities. Research in the sociology of sport has focused on both the direction and intensity of elite player pathways and upon the experiential elements of participation in sport among various migrant groups. The experiences of both elite athletes and non-elite participants have been examined. Consequently it has become clear that intra- and international migration has created a significant intersection of sporting cultures between migrants and indigenous populations. Investigation of this cultural interplay has shed light on how migration trends influence the acculturation strategies and experiences of social agents in sport and beyond. This review will provide an overview of these studies in order to bring together several previously polarized approaches to understanding the influence of sport on acculturation and migration processes. First, the review will focus upon studies which have outlined how sports migration is distributed in complex configurations of geo-political core and periphery relationships. These relationships create an often contradictory landscape of enabling and constraining factors which can influence migration frequency and duration. It will also demonstrate how evidence suggests sports migrant pathways can be ephemeral, contested and contoured by wider trends in globalization processes. Second, the review describes how, against this background of globalization research, a number of studies have uncovered how the experiential elements of sports migration are key to understanding the meanings and stories attached to the migration process on a personal and group level. The review discusses how sport can reflect wider migrant experiences of acculturation and adaptation between and within the spaces they inhabit. These experiences are related to both how elite athletes experience traversing established ‘talent pipelines,’ and also how the sporting experiences of non-elite migrants are contoured by the socio-cultural relationships experienced in both host and donor countries. The review will outline how sport can act both as a unifying factor between communities and as a conduit through which spatial, ‘racial,’ ethnic and cultural barriers can be contested, re-imposed, resisted or transformed. The review concludes by outlining the present state of play in sports migration research, making suggestions for future research directions

"Swim for Health": program evaluation of a multi-agency aquatic activity intervention in the United Kingdom

This study represents a program evaluation of ‘Swim for Health,’ a multi-agency partnership in two local authorities in the United Kingdom which sought to increase aquatic activity participation among four target groups. A theory-driven, scientific program evaluation model was utilised to assess if the program achieved its stated aims (Rossi et al 2003). Chronological records were maintained. Participation figures were collected and triangulated with 20 semi-structured interviews with programme stakeholders. Barriers to programme implementation included a lack of prior needs-analysis of service provision and the goals of the programme did not always match those of stakeholders. Swim for Health increased participation in three of four target groups. Program enhancements were limited by availability of staff able to deliver novel activities other than aqua aerobics. Consequently participants were primarily women. Implications for future programs are discussed

Cybersecurity: mapping the ethical terrain

This edited collection examines the ethical trade-offs involved in cybersecurity: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and between the types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. Foreword Governments and society are increasingly reliant on cyber systems. Yet the more reliant we are upon cyber systems, the more vulnerable we are to serious harm should these systems be attacked or used in an attack. This problem of reliance and vulnerability is driving a concern with securing cyberspace. For example, a ‘cybersecurity’ team now forms part of the US Secret Service. Its job is to respond to cyber-attacks in specific environments such as elevators in a building that hosts politically vulnerable individuals, for example, state representatives. Cybersecurity aims to protect cyberinfrastructure from cyber-attacks; the concerning aspect of the threat from cyber-attack is the potential for serious harm that damage to cyber-infrastructure presents to resources and people. These types of threats to cybersecurity might simply target information and communication systems: a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a government website does not harm a website in any direct way, but prevents its normal use by stifling the ability of users to connect to the site. Alternatively, cyber-attacks might disrupt physical devices or resources, such as the Stuxnet virus, which caused the malfunction and destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Cyber-attacks might also enhance activities that are enabled through cyberspace, such as the use of online media by extremists to recruit members and promote radicalisation. Cyber-attacks are diverse: as a result, cybersecurity requires a comparable diversity of approaches. Cyber-attacks can have powerful impacts on people’s lives, and so—in liberal democratic societies at least—governments have a duty to ensure cybersecurity in order to protect the inhabitants within their own jurisdiction and, arguably, the people of other nations. But, as recent events following the revelations of Edward Snowden have demonstrated, there is a risk that the governmental pursuit of cybersecurity might overstep the mark and subvert fundamental privacy rights. Popular comment on these episodes advocates transparency of government processes, yet given that cybersecurity risks represent major challenges to national security, it is unlikely that simple transparency will suffice. Managing the risks of cybersecurity involves trade-offs: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. These trade-offs are often ethical trade-offs, involving questions of how we act, what values we should aim to promote, and what means of anticipating and responding to the risks are reasonably—and publicly—justifiable. This Occasional Paper (prepared for the National Security College) provides a brief conceptual analysis of cybersecurity, demonstrates the relevance of ethics to cybersecurity and outlines various ways in which to approach ethical decision-making when responding to cyber-attacks

Enhancing the comparability of costing methods: cross-country variability in the prices of non-traded inputs to health programmes

BACKGROUND: National and international policy makers have been increasing their focus on developing strategies to enable poor countries achieve the millennium development goals. This requires information on the costs of different types of health interventions and the resources needed to scale them up, either singly or in combinations. Cost data also guides decisions about the most appropriate mix of interventions in different settings, in view of the increasing, but still limited, resources available to improve health. Many cost and cost-effectiveness studies include only the costs incurred at the point of delivery to beneficiaries, omitting those incurred at other levels of the system such as administration, media, training and overall management. The few studies that have measured them directly suggest that they can sometimes account for a substantial proportion of total costs, so that their omission can result in biased estimates of the resources needed to run a programme or the relative cost-effectiveness of different choices. However, prices of different inputs used in the production of health interventions can vary substantially within a country. Basing cost estimates on a single price observation runs the risk that the results are based on an outlier observation rather than the typical costs of the input. METHODS: We first explore the determinants of the observed variation in the prices of selected "non-traded" intermediate inputs to health programmes – printed matter and media advertising, and water and electricity – accounting for variation within and across countries. We then use the estimated relationship to impute average prices for countries where limited data are available with uncertainty intervals. RESULTS: Prices vary across countries with GDP per capita and a number of determinants of supply and demand. Media and printing were inelastic with respect to GDP per capita, with a positive correlation, while the utilities had a surprisingly negative relationship. All equations had relatively good fits with the data. CONCLUSION: While the preferred option is to derive costs from a random sample of prices in each setting, this option is often not available to analysts. In this case, we suggest that the approach described in this paper could represent a better option than basing policy recommendations on results that are built on the basis of a single, or a few, price observations

Non-disabled secondary school children’s lived experiences of a wheelchair basketball programme delivered in the East of England

Frequently an unquestioned belief is held in UK schools in the value of ‘normalised’ ability in physical education. Consequently inclusion of disabled students can be problematical. Negative perceptions of disability are rarely challenged. This study investigated the embodied experiences of 50 non-disabled secondary school pupils during a programme designed to introduce disability sport to non-disabled schoolchildren entitled ‘The Wheelchair Sports Project.’ Wheelchair Basketball sessions were delivered by coaches during physical education for a 12 week period. 50 pupils aged between 10 and 12 years took part. Non-participant observations were completed during the intervention and guided group interviews were completed with 40 participants pre and post project. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework was utilized during data analysis. The impact of the project on pupils’ perceptions of physical disability was investigated. Prior to the project, pupils emphasized the ‘otherness’ of disabled bodies and described disability sport as inferior and not ‘real.’ Observations highlighted how pupils’ experienced physical challenges adapting to wheelchair basketball. Pupils struggled to control wheelchairs and frequently diverged from acceptable behaviour by using their lower limbs to ‘cheat.’ Post-programme interviews demonstrated pupils’ perceptions of physical disability altered due to their embodied experiences. Pupils described high physical demands of wheelchair basketball and began to focus upon similarities between themselves and physically disabled individuals. However, no reference was made to mental or psychological disability, emphasizing the specificity of the effects of pupils’ embodied experiences on their habitus’